This is a really short announcement, since it’s almost 4am here in Brazil and I should actually be sleeping, instead of building installers for Plone (ha!). But hey, this is exciting enough to keep some people awake all night.

Today, Canonical announces the availability of Landscape Dedicated Server!

So what is it?

One of the many things the Landscape team at Canonical has been working on since early this year is a version of Landscape that can be run on a local network, as opposed to the hosted, Software-as-a-Service version of Landscape that is available to the general public at the moment.

Many people have left us feedback saying that this would be desirable for them, and would actually make Landscape an option in environments where data cannot leave the local network boundaries due to strict policies. So if you’re one of this people or you have evaluated Landscape in the past but decided it was not for you due to this specific reason, this is the time to give Landscape a second look!

So thanks to everyone that has submitted ideas and requests for new features. We’re listening! Even more feedback-driven features are being added monthly, free of charge for existing customers, and the user interface is being polished and fine-tuned for managing large installations. Stay tuned for more announcements!

Over the past few months, friends and family have been very curious about how my new job is going, and it’s been hard to stop for a moment and go into detail about it. I’ve been simply nodding and saying “It’s fine”.

This is an attempt at summarizing all the activity that happened in the last five months, though it’s far from being a short summary. If I had to pick a two words to describe my first five months at Canonical, it would be “Pure Awesomeness“. For a more detailed view, grab a cup of joe or your favorite other beverage and keep on reading.

Today is a special day. Exactly five months ago, on January 5th, I joined Canonical to work on the Landscape project.

It has been quite a ride so far, with two sprints with the Landscape team, AllHands and UDS in Barcelona just a week ago, and lots of excitement about the future. Saying that I’m completely stunned by the work everyone at Canonical has been putting together and how much the teams have grown in the last few months doesn’t do enough justice to it.

At AllHands and UDS we got a short preview of the things that are coming out in the next cycle and beyond. An example of that is the newly formed Design and User Experience (DUX) team which will not only be focusing on Ubuntu itself, but on many other areas across Canonical and the whole Open Source community in general.

At UDS, the DUX team had a special ‘booth’ where any person from any project could walk to them and get advice about their personal or favorite application. One person which has favorably used such advice already was Seif Lofty, from Gnome Zeitgeist. I met Seif during breakfast at the first day of UDS and I cannot describe how excited he was about simply *being* at UDS. And he was certainly twice as happy when he left.

Another person I had the joy to meet was David Siegel, of Gnome Do fame. We teamed during AllHands on the infamous “Fun In The Woods” activity, which had some people walking like zombies on the day after.

Even more importantly, I was able to meet many many more other colleagues from different teams and wrap up some loose ends from tasks that I got started during the first couple months. I’m definitely impressed by the amount of plain brilliant people that are part of Canonical as of today.

In a sense, being at a Canonical event is very much like being at a Plone conference. Everyone seems to be very receptive about new ideas and very friendly and laid back. And as a bonus, I was able to exercise my (not so secret now) power of throwing some crazy ideas around and see how they influence people. And man, I’m already impressed by the outcomes, just a week after the fact.

To me, this has been the most rewarding thing so far, to be able make big contributions not in lines of code, but in ideas that can make a concrete difference in the hands of the right people. This is something that can only be possible at a company the size Canonical is at the moment, where it’s just big enough that you can grab a mind or two to push an agenda without affecting the rest of the team and still small enough that you can influence decisions.

As my colleague Jamu would best describe, “I’m PUMPED!”. :)

But that’s not all. Software-wise, I was able to make some big contributions too. The Landscape team just finished a 6 month development cycle that brought many cool features to life. I’m really happy with that, and specially with the speed that this team can get features from the black board into reality. It’s also a much different environment than what I was used to, with very well-defined and refined processes for ensuring the overall quality of anything that is produced. One process that I’m specially enjoying is the requirement for two positive reviews before landing a branch. I hope to talk more about that soon (that is, sooner than 5 months from now *wink*).

As for my role in the team, it is quite different than what I’m used to. I’ve been focusing a lot on the UI aspects of Landscape, on ways to make things more obvious and more streamlined. I’ve been also writing a ton of Javascript, and collaborating with other teams to define better policies for Javascript testing in general. And finally, we will now have a person from the DUX team dedicated to working with us, which will push work on the Landscape UI even further.

I also had the chance of interacting with the Launchpad team, which has a much more refined process due to the size of their team. Over at Launchpad, I started a branch back in mid-December, even before starting at Canonical, to allow Launchpad to use the Chameleon Template Engine.

That was another wild ride, and during the course of this project I was able to contribute tons of fixes upstream to Malthe Borch to make Chameleon even more compatible with plain old ZPT. In fact, it is so compatible at the moment that due to the magic of z3c.ptcompat Launchpad will be able to run *both* Chameleon and ZPT with the flip of an environment variable. Even more stunning, the changes required to code were minimal, basically changing imports to use z3c.ptcompat, and in templates we’ve had to fix some non-XHTML compliant ones and remove unused i18n tags. I am happy to announce that this branch will soon be merged (it was submitted to PQM, successfully accepted and is waiting to land the buildbot queue). The bad news is that not all tests pass at the moment with Chameleon enabled, but we will be dogfooding and fixing those tests as we go. It was too much pain already to maintain a nearly 6 month old branch outside the main tree. ;)

I am really interested in many of the things that the Launchpad team is doing, process-wise. The PQM seems like a very nice idea for a bigger team like theirs, though it would probably be useful to our smaller team in Landscape too, and to others in general. Hopefully I will get a chance to explore it more and talk about it during the upcoming FISL 10, in Porto Alegre.

Lastly, but not least important, I’m also working on getting nightly builds of the Bzr Installer for Windows rolling, and a more streamlined process for the official builds. Karl Fogel, of Producing OSS fame, and our Launchpad Ombudsman is making sure I keep my promises about that, which is yet another great incentive.

All in all, there’s of course a ton of things I forgot to talk about and which happened in the last 5 months, but this post is already getting too long so I will stop right here and save some of the meat for a future one. Stay tuned!

No, this is not a blog post about the kind of landscape you’re accustomed to, though it might trigger a few ‘I want to be a Landscape Architect’ thoughts from a person or two.

The news this time is that I’m going through a landscape change myself, and to me it’s still a bit scary just to think about it.

The last such change in my life happened roughly ten years ago when I left my job as PHP Programmer and Systems Administrator at a small ISP to start my own company with a few colleagues from university. At that time, leaving PHP behind to learn this new (to me) fancy things called Zope and Python felt really weird, not to mention the fact that I was about 20 and knew no-one of my age that had successfully started a web development company (I mean, I live in a very small town, this is not Silicon Valley).

So cutting to the chase, I would like to let everybody know I will be joining the Landscape team at Canonical starting January 5th. I will not be leaving Enfold Systems though. We keep working together part time at least until April, where we expect to make at least one big release of a fully eggified Enfold Server based on Plone 3.2 in that timeframe. After April, I will still be doing work for Enfold Systems, but the time available for that will much more constrained.

Joining the Landscape team is very exciting to me, not only because I will get to work with some really smart people, but also because I will be working from home and being supervised by one of the top minds in the Brazilian Python scene: Gustavo Niemeyer, responsible for pearls like `Mocker`, `Storm` and `Smart`. And on top of that, I will get to learn new ways of managing and collaborating within a distributed software development team, a subject that was theme for my graduation thesis.

Last, but not least important, there’s a long story of back and forth between me and Canonical that dates back as far as 2004. On that year, DebConf 4 was happening in Porto Alegre which is about one hour drive from where I live.

Hanging out on the #zope3-dev irc channel I’ve noticed that one guy, Steve Alexander, connected from an IP range in Brazil. That struck me as odd because I didn’t know Steve very well, but maybe well enough to guess that something hot was going on. So Steve told me he was here for DebConf, and I self-invited me to stop by and say `hi`.

Arriving at DebConf, I met Steve personally for the first time, and again had an odd sensation there: Steve and about 30-40 folks where separated from the rest of the DebConf crowd on their own room, hacking away. I also met Mark Shuttleworth there and saw him talk about his space flight. That was one of the most exciting things and very heart-warming to me since my dream as a kid was to be an astronaut.

Later on that same day I came to know they were creating a new distro: they were taking name suggestions and voting. It was not surprise at least to me when I first saw Ubuntu being mentioned in the news, though I don’t recall clearly if that was one of the suggestions being voted.

Having just finished a big project using Zope 3 and relational databases, Steve quickly asked for my input on the preliminary design of a Zope 3-based web application for managing translations, which I promptly gave. The code I was looking at right there was the beginning of Launchpad. Up until very recently, Launchpad was powered by a creation of mine named `sqlos`, which has now been replaced by `storm`.

Steve asked me if I was interested in joining the team, but I had to decline given that I had just signed up with Enfold Systems, which was only about a month old at that time. I did put them in touch with a good friend I met only a couple years before: Christian Reis (kiko). In retrospect, that might have been one of the best contributions I made to Canonical, and to Open Source in general.

So, all in all, very exciting news for me. Canonical has a special place in my heart since I basically saw when Ubuntu and Launchpad were born and have some really good friends working there. The situation is no different with Enfold Systems. I have been working with Alan Runyan since before Enfold was Enfold, and really since before Plone was Plone: when Plone 1.0 was announced I was with Alan Runyan, Paul Everitt and Alexander Limi in Paris, at SolutionsLinux 2003, participating on a Zope 3 sprint, mind you.

To summarize, I will be splitting my time between Enfold Systems and Canonical between January 5th and April 1st 2009. After that I will be working full time at Canonical but still expect to contribute significantly at Enfold Systems. One of the responsibilities I have right now and which I don’t want to drop is building the Plone installers for Windows. Hopefully I will keep doing that. Unless some Ubuntu dude sneaks in by night and erases my Windows partition, that is. :)

As pretty much everyone I know has announced, Python 3.0 is out. Pop your bottles open! Fireworks!

What’s more important to end-users though is that third-party libraries are usable with Python 3.0, and not many of them are right now. One particular library has a special place in my heart, and is getting pretty close to being fully compatible with Python 3.0: PyWin32, the Python for Windows Extensions.

I first asked Mark about a year ago if he ever thought that PyWin32 would be ported to Python 3.0, and he was very pessimistic about it. Things changed recently though, and with the “2to3″ library getting more mature, so did the chances of PyWin32 being ported to Python 3.0 increase.

Mark sent a status update with a detailed explanation of the process mid-November (http://tinyurl.com/py3k-win32-status-1) and another two (http://tinyurl.com/py3k-win32-status-2, http://tinyurl.com/py3k-win32-status-3) more recently. I recommend reading those to anyone thinking about porting their libraries to Python 3.0, there’s a lot of great insight there.

To summarize, the great news is that PyWin32 will soon be capable of running on Python 3.0 without being forked: a single installer will work for Python 2.x and Python 3.x thanks to the “2to3″ translation library!

So many thanks to Mark Hammond, Roger Upole and Vernon Cole for their work. To me, the fact that a gigantic and complex library like PyWin32 can be made to run on Python 3.0 at all is the best validation that the Python Developers could possibly get for their work. You did a really amazing job!

Oh, and in case you didn’t notice, PyWin32 is now hosting a Bazaar mirror on Launchpad (https://code.edge.launchpad.net/pywin32), and that’s where Mark is hosting his py3k-integration branch too. Go Launchpad!

Microsoft just announced their Cloud Computing platform, named Microsoft Azure at PDC. Haven’t looked much into the details yet, but one thing jumped out right away when I looked at the ‘what is Azure’ page: the Python logo is in there. It should be no surprise for those following closely the evolution of IronPython and the amount of effort being put on Dynamic Languages at Microsoft.

Now with Google App Engine and Microsoft Azure, Python will be playing an important role in the two biggest Cloud Computing platforms out there. Guido should be feeling really proud of this.

For those not paying attention, there are two new Plone releases out. They have been made during the Plone Conference 2008, so some people might have missed this.

The good news I want to announce is that the buildout-based Plone Installers for Windows have been updated, and a few bugs have been fixed in the process. Namely:

1. Running ‘bin\buildout.exe’ would not show any output. That was because it was generated by running ‘bootstrap.py’ with ‘pythonw.exe’, so that a command prompt would not flash on the screen. I added an extra step at the end that re-runs ‘bootstrap.py’ with ‘python.exe’. So a command prompt will flash quickly, but at least it works right.

2. The version of ‘setuptools’ being shipped in the buildout installer was still ‘0.6c8’, which did not work with Subversion 1.5. At least one person was affected right away by this, and I only found about it because I was watching the #plone channel closely.

To fix those problems I had to make two extra releases, because they came to my knowledge after the release was already uploaded. So if you downloaded an early build of the Plone 3.1.6 buildout-based Installer for Windows, go and fetch the latest build. Otherwise, if you are willing to play with Plone 3.2.0a1, go and fetch that instead.

Even though our GSoC students didn’t had as much success as I hoped, they did contribute some valuable patches that pointed on the right direction.

This week, with the Plone Conference 2008 going on in Washington and the fact I did not attend this conference, I finally made enough time available to get my hands back into Zope again.

So it’s my pleasure to report that after about a week of hard work and a handful of workarounds that will need future cleaning, Zope 2 does now startup under Python 2.6.

My expectation with this now out of my way is that other developers will start looking at adjusting third-party applications (hint: Plone) to run on Python 2.6 as well.

The code is available on the gsoc-python-2.5 branch of the Zope repository, and the lucky guys at the Plone Conference will be amongst the first to hear the good news through Matthew Wilkes, which registered for a stealth Lightning Talk which should get at least some people puzzled. I would love to be there and see their faces when Matthew unveils the surprise.

Big thanks go to Tres Seaver for helping me figure out a change needed in Zope’s private version of ‘medusa’ and to Ranjith Kannikara, our GSoC student through the Zope Foundation, and his friends which did a good chunk of the hard work, namely figuring out changes to the C-based ‘Acquisition’ module and cleaning up string exceptions.

NOTE: This is not intended for production yet, it is just a technology preview to get developers to try out and start porting their own projects. Many bugs still exist, some of which might take up to a month to get fixed. Most importantly, the RestrictedPython implementation has not been fully audited for the new builtins and language constructs introduced since Python 2.4.

Man, some Linux Users (or lusers as some like to call them) really like pain and suffering.

These days, user-friendly distributions like Ubuntu make it easy for even a novice to get a desktop installation up and running smoothly. However, try to get an unusual piece of hardware working, or use a less stable distribution or piece of software, and you’ll probably face a few “challenges”. Now, someone who just want to do some word processing might refer to these as “problems” or “reasons to go back to Windows”, however, I personally find them one of the most exciting features of the operating system. Every time I have a problem, it takes some work and liberal use of everyone’s best friend Google to get over it, but each time I learn a little more about the software I’m using.

(from: 8 Reasons Why Every Computing Student Will Love Linux)

It’s great overall. The face-based clustering is really amazing. Except when it isn’t.

Face grouping is great, except when it isn't.

Word is out that Google is launching a new browser on the market: the Google Chrome. This announcement comes hot on the heels of Google’s agreement renewal with Mozilla foundation.

According to an article last week on NetworkWorld, “Mozilla generates
the bulk of its income from ties to Google, according to the company’s
latest financial figures. For the 2006 tax year — the most recent
numbers made public by Mozilla — 85%, or about $57 million of the
company’s $67 million in annual revenues for the year, came from
Google.”

My take on this is that Google is really stabbing Mozilla on the back.
A G-Browser in my POV is much more likely to steal users from Firefox
than from Internet Explorer for a reason that should be pretty
obvious: most users that care about the browser they are using are
already using Firefox. The great majority of the remaining ones will
just stick with Internet Explorer as they have been doing all along.

Goodbye Firefox. It was great to have you here while it lasted. And thanks for all the fish.